A revenge fantasy about your boss. Your to-do list. That flop of a meeting. You need to quit ruminating about your job. Here’s how to do it.
4 min
It’s one thing to work long hours. It’s another to surrender your free time to swirling thoughts of office predicaments and projects hanging over your head.
Many of us can’t let work go. It’s sinking our mental health and damaging our relationships. We need to shift the approach in our heads.
Joe Mellin thought maybe a week alone in the woods would do it. He journeyed by plane, bus and minivan to a remote pocket of Colorado for a program that coordinates solo wilderness excursions. Armed with a toothbrush, a journal and some dried split peas, the 41-year-old hunkered down to meditate and find out who he was.
Turned out, he was someone who really liked obsessing about his job.
“I was literally saying, Joe, you’re in Colorado, you’re off work, you’re in the middle of a forest, stop thinking about work,” the Washington-based tech worker recalls. By hour 36, in the quiet of his sleeping bag under the moon, he gave in. Soon he was sketching PowerPoint presentations in his journal, filling 20 pages with notes before he was finally able to let go.
Whether you’re on a spiritual quest in Colorado or at the playground with your kids, internally troubleshooting next week’s client pitch or entertaining revenge fantasies about a colleague, there’s a cost.
“You’re getting aggravated anew each time,” says Guy Winch, a psychologist and author who fashioned a TED Talk on the subject.
We often think we have to fix our jobs to relieve our work stress. “You might,” he says. “But fix you first.”
Start by tracking how much time you’re spending ruminating about work, Winch says. For many of his patients, that’s 10 to 20 hours a week—after-hours. (At the office, we’re generally too busy doing the job to perseverate about it, he says.)
To stop the cycle, tax your mental capacity with something more complex than Netflix or a walk. Try a memory task like naming all 50 state capitals or recalling the items in your fridge, Winch suggests. Two to three minutes is often enough for a reset.
Then, channel what you had been obsessing about into something useful. Ask yourself: What’s the actual problem to be solved? If you’re worried about workload, can you delegate to teammates or decline meetings?
If there’s nothing to be done about the situation—some co-workers are just annoying—try to find the silver lining, Winch adds. Maybe this is the spark you finally need to find a new, better job. Maybe you’re building skills that will help you in the future.
We’re bombarded with emails, Slack messages and back-to-back Zoom calls during the day, so it’s no wonder we can’t turn off our brains when we shut the laptop. We mentally brace for pings of all kinds, even when they’re not coming.
And some of this is on us. So many employees have tied their identities to their jobs.
“They’ve defined their whole value this way, so it makes it that much harder to let go of things,” Rebecca Zucker, an executive coach, observes of some of her clients. “Something that goes badly at work can feel annihilating.”
Lauren Orcutt, a 36-year-old in Sacramento, Calif., loves being a copywriter. Some of her friends and family don’t love constantly hearing about it, she says.
“I think about it so much, it just comes out,” she explains.
She’s often up at 3 a.m., galvanised by an idea for a new blog post or needled by the realisation she messed up an email. “I kind of felt like I was working all night” for months, she says. Her sleep suffered.
To reclaim her brain space, Orcutt started jotting down her thoughts in a lavender notebook she now keeps on the nightstand. Mistakes that are plaguing her get their own page, which she rips out in the morning.
“I am going to throw it away and move on with my life,” she says. Even capturing the good ideas calms her, helping her drift back to sleep.
Ruminating about work can make it hard to fall and stay asleep, and damage our mood and mental health, says Verena C. Haun, a professor at the Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg, Germany, who studies psychological detachment from work. Depleted, we often perform worse at work the next day.
She suggests marking the transition from work with a simple ritual, like washing out your coffee cup or changing clothes. Find a hobby, or three, that make you truly forget about work while you’re doing them. Set a goal, say, an hour spent gardening, especially on stressful work days.
You can’t think about work when you’re trying not to crash a boat, Jackie Hermes, the chief executive of a marketing firm, says she discovered. When the onset of the pandemic caused her business’s revenue to drop 40%, she rethought her relationship, once all-consuming, with her job.
“Is this really what I’m dedicating my entire life to?” she asked herself.
She doesn’t work less hours now, but she has changed how she thinks about work, allowing herself more flexibility and trying new things in her personal life. During the day, she’ll sometimes pop into the boating club she recently joined or catch a Milwaukee Brewers game at the ballpark.
“Work isn’t the only priority anymore,” she says, noting that so much about our jobs is out of our control anyway.
Now she tells herself, “I’m not behind. It’s always going to get done.”
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Wall Street’s hottest momentum trade has reversed sharply, as former winners tumble and heavily shorted stocks surge.
3 min
Wall Street’s hottest trade has gone ice cold.
For years, it paid off to buy stocks that were rising in price—and bet against struggling shares. The momentum trade was especially profitable this year, as investors piled into hot stocks including Micron Technology, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other artificial-intelligence darlings while wagering against those likely to be hurt by the embrace of AI.
The S&P 500 Momentum Index soared 44% in the second quarter, its best quarterly performance on record, and it surged 133% over the past five years, nearly double the broad market’s performance.
Mega funds and rookie investors alike piled into the trade, some using leverage and options contracts in an effort to amplify their returns, propelling the underlying shares higher.
“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Matthew Tym, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, of the trade.
Suddenly, the trade is a loser. The momentum index has tumbled more than 9% since July 1, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 2.8% gain. The index—which tracks stocks in the S&P 500 based on a “momentum score”—is on track for the biggest quarterly underperformance in 25 years. July was the second-worst month for the momentum trade in around 40 years, according to Bank of America estimates; the only month worse was April 2009, in the teeth of the global financial crisis.
Hedge funds that bought momentum shares while shorting low-momentum stocks suffered even more. At the same time, a basket of the most popular stocks held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs recorded its biggest one-month underperformance in July relative to the S&P 500 in more than 20 years, according to the bank’s analysts.
Momentum trading is based on a rather simple observation: Investments that go up tend to keep outperforming; those that underperform often remain laggards. This kind of trading might seem too simple a stock-picking strategy to work. Yet it often has.
“For decades, it didn’t take a lot of sophistication to run a momentum strategy and make a decent living at it,” says Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre, a trading firm.
Part of the reason: It takes a while for corporate and other information to spread to various investors, so they slowly build positions, producing buying momentum.
“A huge pension fund can’t flip around its positions in a day,” says Lebron. “Behavioral biases also account for some of the effect, as well—people tend to sell their winners too early and hold losers too long.”
Fans of the strategy point to the human tendency to extrapolate from past results—and chase investment returns—noting that momentum patterns have been evident in markets for decades, even centuries. They also say that some of the worst months for momentum strategies are during longer periods of outperformance.
Some have been doing the trade by buying the strongest investments in a sector while shorting the weakest; others lean in to rising markets or asset classes. Still others use a quantitative approach or turn to banks or others who sell ways to make distinct wagers on momentum as a “tradable factor” or a “thematic basket.”
The fans remain believers. “Any strategy has disappointing periods,” says Antti Ilmanen, global co-head of the portfolio solutions group at AQR Capital Management.
The surge in Moderna and other biotech stocks helped crush the momentum trade. These shares were among the most heavily shorted in recent years, but positive news on a cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck sent those stocks flying, crushing some quant and other hedge funds. Moderna is up around 150% so far this month.
These traders had an especially rough day on Aug. 19, which Goldman Sachs told its clients was the worst day for “systematic long-short managers” in more than two years. About half of the losses were because of momentum trades, the bank said.
Some traders have begun to short, or bet against, the very stocks that propelled the momentum trade earlier this year. Net short positions in futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 index among speculators recently climbed to some of the highest levels of the past two decades, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The about-face is a sign of how markets have become more treacherous for investors, even as indexes keep climbing. Part of the issue: the recent meltdown of Situational Awareness, a hedge fund that had piled into some of the most popular momentum shares, including chip stocks. After a period of market tumult, Nvidia shares rocketed almost 9% after its earnings, showing how quickly sentiment can shift.
Some investors say the run-up in share prices driving tech stocks higher reminds them at times of the dot-com frenzy decades ago.
Mike Ogborne, the founder of San Francisco-based Ogborne Capital Management, said he has grown more cautious on technology stocks and is keeping more of his portfolio in cash than he typically does.
And he is nervous about the surge in spending by technology giants and quarterly capital expenditures that keep rising.
“It is a little bit like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. You don’t know when midnight is going to come around,” Ogborne said. “They don’t send a memo around telling you when the capex cycle is over.”
